Eastern Bering Sea- 2005

• Main Authors: S. Rodionov, P. Stabeno, J. Overl, N. Bond, S. Salo
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Bering Sea
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.575.9442; http://www.beringclimate.noaa.gov/reports/bs_05.pdf

average, the depth-integrated temperatures at Mooring 2 indicate that the shift to warmer conditions in the Bering Sea began in the spring of 2000. This warming becomes comparable in its scale with major warm episodes in the late 1930s and late 1970s – early 1980s. The spring transition is occurring earlier, and the number of days with ice cover after March 15 has a significant downward trend. In 2005, the ice cover index reached the record low value. The lack of ice cover over the southeastern shelf during recent winters resulted in significantly higher heat content in the water column. Sea surface temperature in May 2005 was above its long-term average value, which means that the summer bottom temperatures will likely be also above average. The winter of 2005 in the Bering Sea was anomalously warm, with the mean winter (DJFM) surface air temperature (SAT) at St. Paul being 2.34°C (or 1.4 standard deviations) above the 1961-2000 average. This increases our confidence that a shift toward a warmer climate in the Bering Sea occurred in 2001 (Fig. 1a). The significance level for this shift is 0.09, which is based on the two-tailed Student t-test for the difference in the mean SAT values for the periods 1990-2000 and 2001-2005. This difference would have been even more statistically significant if there